Your Personalized Rocovery Plan
Serenity: How to Recognize, Understand
and Recover from Behavioral Addictions
As a medical doctor with four decades of experience in rehabilitation, a psychotherapist who has worked in recovery from behavioral addictions for thirty years, and a recovering codependent who has maintained sobriety for thirty-five years, I can help you create your own personalized recovery program out of whatever resources are available to you. I guarantee it will work if you work it!
For change to occur, a long-term recovery program is necessary. A carefully developed plan will help you endure the bad times when they inevitably come, giving you a structure to adhere to when your willpower begins to fail you. The difference between good advice and real help, and the difference between failure and success, is the presence of something to hold onto when you begin to falter.
There are many different commercial recovery programs available to choose from. But not everyone will have the time to abandon their regular lives and go on a retreat for a month—or the money to afford such a program. The program I propose in Serenity will consider everything commercial recovery programs offer,
but you’ll be in charge of finding the right professionals within your own reach and organizing them into a network to fulfill your needs. You alone can take on the responsibility to create the circumstances necessary for your success. There’ll be no one but you there in the wee hours of the night when your cravings start yelling inside your brain and every cell in your body cries out for oblivion—just this once!
Finally, people are different, so to accommodate different kinds of people, recovery programs must be different, too. Indeed, to achieve maximum effectiveness, they must not only be merely different—they must be personalized.
One size does not fit all.
SERENITY
Change is a process that takes time and effort, not just a decision that “from now on,
things will be different.”
Your personalized
recovery program elements
Addiction is a disease with consequences across all four dimensions of a person’s life—the body, the mind, relationships, and the spirit. Everyone has these dimensions, and the personalized recovery program we create will be oriented around them. Make sure you don’t exclude any of the dimensions, and be sure to put most of your efforts into your weakest one.
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In Serenity, you’ll find all these elements listed and thoroughly explained. Throughout the book, you’ll find a set of exercises that will help you orient your efforts around your most important problems and keep them in check.
Body:
01
Regular exercise, balanced diet, sleep and rest, play, yoga and martial arts ...
Mind:
02
Psychotherapy, learning about addiction, journaling, emotional regulation ...
Relationships:
03
Therapy groups, support groups, marriage and family counseling, friends and family, work relationships ...
Spirituality:
04
Meditation, creative expression (art), prayer, religious community ...